Etnografia do samba em Salvador: tradição, mercado e espetacularização

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to contribute to the study of the samba dance style and music genre in the Greater Salvador area. It starts from the perception that, after a certain "invisibility" experienced with the rise of axé music in the 1980s, urban samba with an Afro-Bahian tradition has reappeared in Salvador in the last two decades in various events, which constitute in new spaces of socialization and leisure that recreate and maintain the traditional ways of making samba in the city. These ways of making samba are inserted in the current scenario of market production and media dissemination of the music produced in Bahia, as well as in the context of spectacularization that marks the culture in contemporary societies. In an attempt to map its extent and to build a panoramic view of these practices, this research was developed as an ethnography of the samba in the Greater Salvador area, including some events of different types and dimensions, highlighting especially a few major events like the Caminhada do Samba parade, held every year since 2005 during the carnival festivity, the celebrations of the Black Awareness month (in November) and the Samba Day in early December. The study concludes that the resumption of samba in Salvador demonstrates that samba integrates the way of life of the black and mestizo population of the city, as a musical and symbolic basis of their cultural practices, especially to face the segregationist clashes that, historically, marked these practices and guarantee the preservation of samba through constant renewal, influenced by the city’s cultural context.